The Old Library smelled like dust that had given up settling.
Lin Yue spread the notes across the reading table in the order he always used — earliest to latest, left to right, so that if a pattern existed it would have to reveal itself the same way a sentence did, one word walking into the next. The desk-orientation diagram. Ning Yue's notebook fragments, copied out in Su Qing's careful hand now that Ning Yue no longer existed to keep her own. The shadow's path, marked in Bai Wuyin's charcoal. The classroom numbers, circled where they repeated. The riddle, folded and refolded so many times the crease had gone soft as cloth.
Eight classrooms face the rain. Seven windows know your name. Six notebooks hide one page. Five shadows leave no stain.
He laid a finger against the fourth line and left it there, thinking.
